


Protection

by Neuqe



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Cisco being protective, Established Relationship, Hurt!Barry, M/M, Mostly pure fluff, Set at some point when everything is mostly happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 03:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7024999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neuqe/pseuds/Neuqe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry and Cisco get kidnapped before their date night. Cisco is pissed off for multiple reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Protection

The first thing Barry was aware of was the extremely cold concrete floor underneath his cheek. The next thing was the agonizing pain going through his entire body. He felt like he had been hit by a truck approximately thousand times. He blinked rapidly and realised he was staring at Cisco, who was sitting at the floor leaning on a grey concrete wall. His hands were behind his back in a slightly weird angle. It took Barry a moment to realise that his hands were probably tied up. A wave of worry hit him.

“Good mornin’, sleeping beauty,” Cisco said with a half a smile but a frown of worry was present on his face as well, “how are you feelin’?”

“Not too good,” Barry admitted and tried to get into a sitting position as well but it turned out to be much more difficult task when he noticed his hands were handcuffed as well.

Cisco’s frown only deepened by Barry’s words and now the worry was shining from his face. “But I’ll survive,” Barry rushed to continue, “are you okay?”

Cisco seemed to be physically in better shape, his hair was a mess but otherwise he seemed to be in same condition as earlier today when Barry had seen him. Barry was rather sure that the same could not be said about himself. He was still wearing his suit, the mask and all, but imagined that he looked beaten up. He felt a dried stain of blood on his face and his left eye did not open completely. Still he could see that Cisco was clearly upset by the current situation anyway.

“I’m fine,” he confirmed with a small nod.

Barry felt a small wave of relief washing over him. He, now also sitting at the floor, looked around the small room. There were no windows, everything around them was grey and made out of concrete the only exception being a metal door. “What happened?”

“My ground breaking theory is that we were kidnapped,” Cisco declared and Barry could not help but smile because that was rather obvious.

“Perfectly reasonable theory,” he confirmed very seriously, “the last thing I remember is arriving to the cortex after stopping that bank robbery downtown.”

It had been relatively easy case, no metahumans, mere normal bank robbers with few guns. Nothing he could not have handled.

Cisco nodded again, “yeah, that’s my last memory, too. We must’ve been drugged in the cortex. Something airborne. Although you look like you received a beating with that drug as well. Whoever did this most likely suspected that whatever drug they gave us wouldn’t keep you down because of your metabolism.” Cisco’s jaw was set and his voice exuded anger.

“I could try to phase through the walls,” Barry said. He was measuring the walls with his gaze.

“Oh, no. You aren’t doing that. I’ve developed a great scale of whether you are fit enough to do any sort of Flash business. You need to be able to stand more than five seconds,” Cisco told and gave him a pointed look.

“Point taken. But we still need to get out of here.”

“I’m working on a plan, I got this,” he assured but sighed deeply and looked at the ceiling. “Man, we need a better security system for the lab. We aren’t gonna ask help from Team Arrow because they have more serious security breaches than ours.”

Barry let out a small laugh but he ended it abruptly as a burning pain appeared to his abdomen. “Do you think the others are alright?”

“I’d assume so. We were the only ones in the lab. Caitlin was gonna have a lunch with Iris, and Harry was gonna take Jesse out to see the colleges of Earth 1,“ Cisco reassured and kept a small pause. “You know, when we started this whole Flash business, Felicity warned me that super villains and kidnappings would become a norm, but I didn’t take her seriously because they live in a gloomy Star City. I should’ve believed her back then. I have lost count how many times this has happened.”

Barry felt a sting of pure guilt as most of these things were brought upon them by him. If he had not decided to become the Flash, the people close to him would have not suffered as much they had when helping him.

“Hey, none of that,” Cisco had noticed his guilt ridden expression, “it’s not your fault. You are not the one who kidnapped us.” He told with gentler tone.

Barry gave him the smallest of smiles.

“I’m just annoyed as hell that this keeps happening. We even had plans for tonight,” Cisco groaned.

“You are annoyed because kidnapping will ruin our date night?” Barry was slightly amused.

“Dude, we were supposed to watch _Deadpool._ It’s been months since the premiere and we still haven’t seen it,” Cisco continued his ranting, “and it isn’t like we have too much time for each other anyway.”

Admittedly, their lives were busy and even though they spent majority of their time together at STAR labs, stopping metahumans and facing mortal danger did not actually count as dating.

Barry let out a sigh. Cisco did have a point. “You’re right. This happens way too often if our biggest issue with kidnapping is how inconvenient it’s with our schedule.”

“Oh no, my biggest issue ain’t that. My biggest issue is that someone drugged, beat up and kidnapped _you_. But, you know, ruining our date night is pretty high on priority list also.” He flashed a quick smile.

Barry was struck by the sudden realisation how much he loved Cisco. The situation and timing for this probably was not the best, but damn he loved him. For all his life, Barry had been the one sticking up for the weaker ones and that got him into various fights at school. Now that he was the Flash, everyone was expecting him to stick up for the entirety of Central City. Barry loved being the hero but he appreciated a lot that Cisco never thought him as invincible and had taken his safety as his responsibility.

“How do you think did this to us?” Barry tried to emphasize the last word because he was equally angry that someone had hurt Cisco.

“My best guess is Dr Evil.”

For the past two weeks metahumans had been found dead all over Central City. All of them had different causes of death and the cases seemed to be unconnected as far as CCPD was concerned. The victims had nothing common except that all of them had had powers resulted from the particle accelerator explosion. Caitlin had deduced based on the coroner’s reports that someone was murdering the metas for their powers. More precisely, someone was investigating their powers medically and was not too concerned whether the subject of investigation lived or died.

The team suspected that none of them had survived as the body count was almost ten already. Barry wanted to catch whoever was terrorizing his city because contrary to popular belief, not all metahumans of Central City were evil. Catching the serial killer was more challenging as they never left behind any crucial evidence and all the team Flash knew about them was that they possessed medical skills and had an excessive knowledge about metahumans.

“Dr Evil?” Amusement was clearly present in Barry’s tone.

“Shush, I’m still working on it.” Cisco opened his mouth to continue talking, but he abruptly closed it as the metal door made an awful creaking sound and a man in his thirties waltzed into the small room. He was wearing a bloody doctor’s coat and his smirk was rather unnerving. He left the door open behind him apparently certain that neither one of them would escape.

“Good, you are awake,” the man said as if they would have just woken up from a long nap instead of being held captive in a basement.

“We would have been awake this whole time if someone hadn’t drugged us,” Cisco muttered but the man ignored him.

“I have to say, it’s an honour to meet Flash himself,” he told with smooth voice and kept studying him with his gaze. Barry tried to phase his hands free from the handcuffs but was not successful. He tried to push himself into a standing position by leaning on the wall but his legs were like water bags and fell back to the floor. Cisco might have had a point with the scale.

“Who are you?”

The man seemed to be almost offended by the question. “That’s not important. The important thing is that I seem to be the only one who realises the benefits of the particle accelerator explosion. You, the metahumans, are medical miracles. Imagine the possibilities if we could harness your healing capabilities. I just need to examine and investigate the metas.”

“By examining and investigating you mean torturing them with your scientific experiments and dumbing their bodies all over Central City?” Cisco asked bitterly.

The man glanced at Cisco as if he had only now realised that he was in the room also. “Unfortunately it is true that most of them died in the process,” he glanced at Barry again, “but then again, maybe you will last longer.”

“You don’t get to lay a finger on him.” Cisco had managed to stand up and was now blocking Barry with his body.

“What are you going to do to stop it?” The arrogance and belittling were present his voice.

Barry quickly realised that the man probably had no idea that Cisco was also a metahuman. He intended to keep it so because that way at least Cisco had better chances of getting out of this situation mostly unharmed but Cisco seemed to be completely indifferent to his own safety. Doing reckless and potentially extremely dangerous stuff to protect him was not what Barry meant when he thought how much he appreciated Cisco looking after him. For a second Barry wondered if this was how Cisco felt almost everyday basis when he was on the field trying to defeat rogue metas with the most absurd ways.

“What are you doing?” Barry muttered behind Cisco, who was still giving the death glare to the Dr Evil. Barry tried to stand up again but his legs still refused to cooperate. It was not that he did not trust Cisco. No, he really did. Cisco was one of the smartest people he had ever met and his plans had saved Barry from certain death more times than he dared to count.

But at the moment, Barry could not figure out Cisco’s plan. He most likely had a plan. Hopefully. Was he going to vibe the doctor? That would only immobilize Cisco for a moment, not the psychopathic medical professional.

Barry could see how Cisco readjusted his hands so that his palms were facing each other. 

“This,” he said, and Barry was not sure if he was answering to his or the doctor’s question. The next thing Barry could see was small vibrations being formed between Cisco’s palms and soft sound of _click_ followed and just like that Cisco’s hand were free.

Cisco shook his hands and the doctor’s face was perplexed and full of some sort of shock. “Yeah, turns out the Flash ain’t the only one with powers,” Cisco remarked, and before the doctor could do anything, he had straightened his arms and shot out two, much stronger, waves of vibrations out of his palms. The vibrations hit their target and the doctor actually _flew_ across to the small room and hit the wall with a loud thump. He went limp after the impact and fell to the floor.

Cisco winced as he saw what happened. Barry was still in awe of what had happened but he assumed that Cisco had not meant the vibrations to be that strong. “Cisco--“ Barry breathed out and, being his stubborn self, tried to get up for the third time without a considerable success.

Cisco, on the other hand, rushed next to the doctor’s limp body and carefully placed few of his fingers on his neck. He let out an audible sigh.

“He’s alive, very unconscious, but alive,” Cisco reported and turned around to face Barry.

Barry was silently just staring at Cisco still in awe because since when he was able to shoot vibrations out of his hands and why he had not told him about it. More importantly, huge wave of relief and gratefulness washed over him because they had actually survived a situation that seemed quite hopeless at the times and Cisco had saved them, once again.

However, Cisco seemed to misinterpret his facial expression, which was no surprise as it was still covered in dried blood and felt as if it was more swollen than few moments ago, as he straightened up with slightly horrified look on his face. He took few steps closer to Barry, but stopped abruptly and lowered his gaze to his hands, and then back to Barry.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he told with a weak voice.

Barry felt as if that tone alone was capable to break his heart. “Hey, I know that.” Barry told him and straightened out his left arm as an invitation to come and help him up. “That’s not what I’m worried about or ever will,” he added, “but are you okay?”

Cisco seemed to be more than little shaken up.

He was already by Barry’s side, helping him to finally stand up, even though it was more like leaning on Cisco with almost all of his weight. “Yeah, no, I will be,” Cisco muttered, “I haven’t actually used my powers to hurt someone before, and I didn’t mean the vibrations to be that powerful.”

“He deserved it, though,” Barry tried to comfort, but he knew from experience that the feeling would be hard to shake off. It was always hard to justify the use of one’s powers to hurt someone even if it was with good intentions. He pressed a soft kiss on Cisco’s temple. “And since when you were able to do that?”

Cisco was grinning now. “Since last week?” he suggested with a chuckle. “You remember last week when you were fighting that Ice Queen at the stadium and she froze your comms and cut off the connection? Yeah, I might have panicked a bit at that point and I accidently shoot vibration out of my hand and made my chair to wheel across the cortex and I knocked tons of Cait’s medical supplies to the floor. There’s also a freaking crack on the cortex’s floor.”

“And I kinda forgot to tell you because I was too busy planning how to save your ass also then,” Cisco continued, “and today it seemed that my powers were the only solution to get out of this so I figured out it was worth of a shot, literally.”

Barry grinned. “So me being in danger triggers rest of your powers?”

“It’s a theory in progress, but seems so,” Cisco said. He readjusted Barry’s left arm over his shoulders so that he could properly help Barry to walk. He glanced Barry sideways. “This is not an open invitation to do more reckless shit that ends up with you facing mortal danger. I love you too much and I’ll personally kick your ass if you end up having any more near death experiences within a week.”

Barry laughed properly as he took the first steps with the help of Cisco. “I love you, too, and consider me as duly noted. I’m proud of you, though.”

Cisco smiled one of his genuine smiles and despite the circumstances Barry felt incredibly happy and lucky.

Cisco glanced at the unconscious body, “he can wait CCPD there, and we are finally getting out of here. And you gotta get checked out by Caitlin and we are going take like a week off.”

“Or until the next metahuman crisis occurs.”

“Yeah, well, that’s small details,” Cisco cracked a smile fully knowing that Barry was most likely correct with his assumption that they would not be able to take a week off.

“Pretty sure that by now the universe owns us a one date night that won’t be ruined by the Flash business,” Barry joked as they walked out of the room.

“Yeah, that seems only fair.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm slowly making my way through my wips folder now that I have actually time. I think I promised the next fic was supposed to be for Flashvibe week but this had been work in process since February so I really wanted to finish this one. I'm sorry for my unbelievably bad skills for naming the bad guys in these ficlets. All mistakes are mine, but anything else isn't.


End file.
